NEWS & PRESS

Dr Baojiu Li of the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics of the University of Cambridge has won the 2009 RAS Michael Penston Prize in recognition of his outstanding PhD thesis.
Baojiu worked on the physical and cosmological implications of modified gravity theories, a key area of interest in astronomy... More

Using a combination of instruments on ESO’s Very Large Telescope, a UK-led international team of astronomers have discovered the most massive stars to date, one which at birth had more than 300 times the mass of the Sun, twice as much as the currently accepted limit. The existence of these monsters — millions of times more... More

Dr David Halliday of Schlumberger Cambridge Research has been awarded the Keith Runcorn prize for his 2009 PhD thesis on research at the University of Edinburgh. David's work focused on using interferometry to estimate surface waves between geophone receivers (geophones convert ground movement into voltage and are a key tool of... More

Dr Ben Davies, Dr Caitriona Jackman and Dr Thomas Kitching will take up the 2010 RAS Fellowships. For three years from October 2010, the three scientists will respectively hold their Fellowships at the Institute of Astronomy in Cambridge, University College London and the Institute for Astronomy at the Royal Observatory... More

A team of astronomers from Germany, Bulgaria and Poland have used a completely new technique to find an exotic extrasolar planet. The same approach is sensitive enough to find planets as small as the Earth in orbit around other stars. The group, led by Dr Gracjan Maciejewski of Jena University in Germany, used Transit Timing... More

The July digest of forthcoming space and astronomy events, from the RAS. This month sees the Rosetta spacecraft fly past the asteroid Lutetia, a total solar eclipse and a planetary conjunction in the twilight sky.
10 July: Rosetta encounters asteroid Lutetia
On the evening of 10 July, the European Space Agency (ESA)... More

Many of the Milky Way’s ancient stars are remnants of other smaller galaxies torn apart by violent galactic collisions around five billion years ago, according to researchers at Durham University, who publish their results in a new paper in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
Scientists at... More

Using two of the world’s largest telescopes, an international team of astronomers have found evidence of a collision between galaxies driving intense activity in a highly luminous quasar. The scientists, led by Montserrat Villar Martin of the Instituto de Astrofisica de Andalucía-CSIC in Spain, used the Very Large Telescope... More

For the first time, a team of astronomers has succeeded in investigating the earliest phases of the evolutionary history of our home Galaxy, the Milky Way. The scientists, from the Argelander Institute for Astronomy at Bonn University and the Max-Planck Institute for Radioastronomy in Bonn, deduce that the early Galaxy went... More

A team of scientists from the Instituto Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) and the University of Texas has succeeded in identifying one of the most complex organic molecules yet found in the material between the stars, the so-called interstellar medium. The discovery of anthracene could help resolve a decades-old astrophysical... More